When a company sets selling prices of a product, it is important to take into consideration a balance between selling prices and benefits that a customer thinks he/she can obtain from the product (hereinafter, referred simply to as “benefit(s)”). Namely, when a retail price is higher as compared with a benefit, the customer does not buy the product. On the contrary, if the retail price is too low as compared with the benefit, a profit obtained from one product will become small. Hence, techniques for appropriately setting the price by estimating the benefit have been studied.
As one of the techniques for supporting the price setting of the product, there is a technique using a value map in which indexes of benefits (hereinafter, referred to as “benefit value(s)”) and a selling price for a plurality of product are plotted as two axes on a plane (Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2004-86515). A company can use the value map in which the selling prices and the benefit values of the company's product and competitor's product are plotted with two axes, as information useful for estimating appropriate selling prices of the company's product in the current market.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2004-86515 discloses a price setting system for calculating product prices based on information including material costs or the like regarding a product specified by a person who wishes to purchase. According to Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2004-86515, it is possible to appropriately set prices, since the possibility that information on the material costs changes according to a total usage amount of materials which are common to a plurality of types of product, the possibility that prices are set based on information on volume of sales of the newest product, and the possibility that the material costs corresponding to the total usage amount of the materials which are common to the plurality of types of the product, are taken into consideration.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-306832 discloses an online sales system for musical pieces, in which a sales server sets selling prices for musical pieces according to a popularity ranking of musical pieces determined by a ranking server based on information on previews, downloads, or popularity votes of musical pieces which are performed by users of terminal units, and publishes the selling prices and the popularity rankings of the musical pieces on homepages.
For example, when a company sets selling prices of a product, there is a case where it may become important to understand the benefits of the product. However, since what aspects of the product have importance in purchasing the product are different from customer to customer, levels of the benefits of the product may possibly change depending on respective customer's viewpoints. However, the prior art or combination thereof does not take this into account.